Sunday, October 14, 2012

What is Emily W. Kane reading?

I tend to read two categories of books, social science studies as my professional reading and novels as my personal reading. And my favorites in both categories usually capture the intersections of inequalities of gender, race, class, sexuality and nation. A few examples of what I’m currently reading or have recently read in each category may help explain what I mean by that.

I’m teaching a seminar on gender and family right now, in which my students and I are currently reading Cameron MacDonald’s Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering (University of California Press, 2010) and will next turn to Lisa Brush’s Poverty, Battered Women and Work in U.S. Public Policy (Oxford, 2011). Both of these interview-based analyses engage the intersecting effects of gender inequality, racial inequality, class inequality and national/international public policy in shaping the daily lives of families in the contemporary United States.... [Brush] addresses the constraints faced by poor women ensnared at the crossroads of a stingy public assistance system and an insufficiently attentive criminal justice system. Both...[read on]

From the selection of toys, clothes, and activities to styles of play and emotional expression, the family is ground zero for where children learn about gender. Despite recent awareness that girls are not too fragile to play sports and that boys can benefit from learning to cook, we still find ourselves surrounded by limited gender expectations and persistent gender inequalities. Through the lively and engaging stories of parents from a wide range of backgrounds, The Gender Trap provides a detailed account of how today’s parents understand, enforce, and resist the gendering of their children. Emily Kane shows how most parents make efforts to loosen gendered constraints for their children, while also engaging in a variety of behaviors that reproduce traditionally gendered childhoods, ultimately arguing that conventional gender expectations are deeply entrenched and that there is great tension in attempting to undo them while letting 'boys be boys' and 'girls be girls.'